The Blog of G » HTPC

Why have a HTPC?

George — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:00:45 +0000

It’s a question people ask, often with an air of disbelief, like why would you want to have a pc in your living room?

There are a lot of plus sides to it, not least of which is a 32″ widescreen monitor to surf the web with. But that’s only a small plus, first off what does a HTPC do for you?

Well a home theatre personal computer is exactly that it’s a computer for your home theatre, or in my case, living room. How does this add to your home theatre? for a start it’s 1 box for your DVD player, all your music, digital photo’s, TV recording’s and Home Movies. That’s what Windows Media Centre 2005 will do out of the box. Is it difficult to setup? not really, you can do it all from the remote once the operating system is installed.

For me there are 3 killer features…

My Photos – allows basic photo editing and slideshowing your photo albums
My Music – The Music collection
My TV – schedule and watch TV recording’s

The last of these gets the most use in our house, although having a photo slide show as wallpaper means both myself and Elly get to see those precious moments plenty.

I love the Music portion of Media centre, it was a bit time consuming to get all the info and album art sorted out but once thats done, it makes it so easy to find your favourite artists’ or albums. I’ll post another time about my personal experiences tagging over 20 Gb or about 10,000 individual audio files, it’s actually not as time consuming as you might think.

Where Media centre comes into it’s own is working hand in hand with our set top box for TV. it means outside of Grand Prix, neither myself or Ellybabes watch TV “live” anymore. Instead we record all our favourite TV shows and we can watch whatever takes our fancy at that particular time. So much better than spending 20 minutes flicking through channels till you find something worth watching.

This is really easy to do, just search by keyword till you find the program you like and select “record series” you can even tell it to record all showings on all channels or just new episodes, but once you take those 2 minutes to decide that, media centre just does it. The NTL set top box is far less reliable, needing to be rebooted at least once a week.

What if 2 shows are on at the same time? first media centre tries to find an alternative showing of either show, if it can’t then, it decides what to record based on the recording priorities the user sets. So for instance, we’re huge “Bones” and “Boston legal” fans, to make sure we don’t miss an episode these are top of our priority list.

Whereas “The Simpsons” which is on so many channels and almost daily, it’s near the bottom of the priority list as there always being re-shown.

What all this means is that when we sit down to relax and watch some telly what we want to watch is always on.

So is that it? well not entirely, there is a lot more to it than that and in a future post, I’ll touch on the why I chose Microsoft Media Centre and the benefits that it will bring when we move into our new home.

An unconfirmed rumour of a great HTPC accessory

George — Sat, 19 May 2007 17:25:08 +0000

Wow, I spotted this on Gizmodo yesterday. An unconfirmed rumour of a new Logitech peripheral ideal for the HTPC user with a Media Centre PC. I just hope that it’s not Vista only. That would rule me out for the foreseeable future. I’ve heard to many storeys about DRM gone mad on the new Microsoft OS so I’m not planning on upgrading until I get a chance to check them out further.

Anyway, this little keyboard is a great idea, we’ve gotten used to having a wireless keyboard and mouse in the living room as well as the remote, but it would be nice to be able to put them away outta sight and still have all the functionality.

HTPC Problem

George — Thu, 17 May 2007 07:23:42 +0000

There was another problem with the HTPC…

What to do with the boxes?

The new HTPC in my life, Part 2

George — Wed, 16 May 2007 07:20:11 +0000

The really observant of you will no doubt have noticed my stupid mistake already, if not then the above photo, along with the last one on yesterdays post, shows the mistake I made. Yes, that little mounting bracket around the CPU socket was supposed to have been fitted before the motherboard goes into the case. Not a big mistake, by any means, but it was enough to highlight, to me, how much things had changed since I last built a PC from components. So, I decided to halt assembly until my old friend Bernard was able to drop round and help me.

With Bernard ~~helping~~ doing most of the assembly that part of thing’s proceeded fairly uneventfully. That is until it came to installing the DVD-writer! the drive itself bolted in very easily and appeared to be lined up correctly. When we went to attach the aluminium “drive door” we discovered that this was not the case. We had to loosen the drive cage mountings and hold the drive into the correct position and then tighten everything up again and while there was less than 1mm in the difference this was prolly the single most time consuming part of the assembly.

Once the drive was located correctly, it should have been a simple enough to just stick the “drive door” in place with the provided double sided sticky tape, unfortunately the original drive door had a little bit of plastic located in such a way that we couldn’t get the door to line up correctly. Thirty seconds with the Dremel later it fitted.

At this point I’d like to remind you that this was a brand new drive, I hadn’t even tested it to see if it worked, so with the benefit of hindsight it was a pretty stupid thing to do, seeing as how I had voided the warranty!

It seemed a shame to hide all that copper under a cover but cover it we did.

Then came the tedious part of any new PC build HT or not, the software! About 20 minutes were spent configuring various different Bios’s, Motherboard, Raid controller and then after, some partitioning and formatting the Windows 2005 Media Centre Edition was slotted into the shiny DVD drive and the Operating system Install began, rather than bore you all with that, click this link for a great step by step guide courtesy of The Green Button. I just followed the instructions provided there and everything was straight forward and it Just worked, as the Mac faithful like to say

The Last 2 parts of the software installation were interesting. Part of the reason I used an Intel Board for this Machine was because I wanted to checkout what all the Viiv fuss was about and I have to say, I’m sorry I installed the Viiv software, in almost every way. It’s completely useless as a media server unless your network hub is Viiv approved! it won’t allow streaming of shows or any media for that matter Still, there are other options for sharing your own media, legally, but I think this post is long enough and I’ll leave that for another.

The other Item was the LCD panel, I installed the driver and application and it displayed time and date immediately when I hit the green button on the remote MCE poped up and the LCD displayed “Welcome to MCE” played a few music tracks and the artist, album, track info etc. starts scrolling past same when watching a movie or TV show. There was no configuration required at all. The only downside is that unfortunately it doesn’t transmit IR so we still have to use the Microsoft receiver/transmitter to change channels on the set-top box. Not really a big problem though other than the extra cables.

All in all, Both myself and Elly are very pleased with the results, it’s whisper quiet except for the first 5 seconds of bootup, but then it runs 24/7 so that’s not really an issue.

Having this in the living room is great, it’s our main PC in the house so it gets used a lot (32″ widescreen HDTV makes a great monitor )and unlike most people’s preconceptions windows rarely complains, in fact our NTL set-top box needs to be rebooted more often than the HTPC. Now if only there were some way I could connect the cable directly to the HTPC I’d be in home theatre heaven.

The new HTPC in my life, Part 1

George — Tue, 15 May 2007 07:17:07 +0000

On of the things that happened while this blog was sleeping was that our old HTPC gave up the ghost. Now to be fair this was not a young machine and it wasn’t built to be a HTPC originally but it got “re-tasked” when it was about 3 years old. The day that it passed on it was over 6 years old! Not bad considering it ran 24/7 for 3 years or so.

Anyway, having lived with a HTPC for a few years it was immediately critical that we (myself and Ellybabes) got it replaced and after considering a shuttle option and having difficulties with Shuttle resellers not offering the model we wanted and the only one that did flat out refusing to support the config we wanted, we made the decision to build our own.

So after a bit of shopping around I ordered all the components from a few different online stores…

Elara, Provided the Motherboard. When others Let me down, Kin sorted me out in a matter of days. Thanks
Quiet PC supplied the case, CPU heatsink & fan, Graphics card, Power supply and some excellent advice.
Dabs provided the Ram, hard disks and the DVD Writer

I decided to reuse the Hauppage PVR-350 tuner card from the old Media Centre to save a little on cost and prayed that it wouldn’t be one of those “christ I wish I hadda” moments

After about a week and a half all the parts arrived within 2-3 days of each other. The hard disks were the last to arrive and there’s only so much you can do with the rest of the components, so I took a few photo’s.

Some of the boxes arriving.

The fantastic Zalman Packaging.

And the visually Stunning MSI Silent Graphics Card

So after the unboxing I snapped the case before starting to assemble.

which was severely hampered by my stupidity

So what did I do that was stupid? Well, your just going to have to come back tomorrow to find out what I did wrong and how I solved the problem, completed the assembly and installed the operating system.

F1 Season Kicks Off

George — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 22:38:33 +0000

The 2007 F1 Grand Prix season begins tonight with the first practice session of the new season. I’m not going to stay up for it, but I have set it to record on the Media Centre, so, I’ll be watching that while I have breakfast in the morning.

Then tomorrow night I’ll be staying up for qualifying. Saturday being Paddy’s day and the race being that night, I’m really glad that Monday is a holy day. I pray I can recover, before Tuesday.

Hopefully, I’ll find a minute or two over the weekend to post a little more as well.

While this blog was “sleeping”…

George — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 06:17:01 +0000

So, I had a few technical difficulties of my own making and it took me a while to get thing’s back up and running, but as we all know life doesn’t stop just ’cause your blog is offline and I have been busy. here’s a quick round up in no particular order…

Our old media centre PC decided it had enough and shuffled off this mortal coil

We built a new Media Centre PC

We switched phone, broadband and TV providers
I spent a day in St. James hospital (Turned out to be nothing serious:))

Christmas

New Year

Wedding planning

I started my new Job

Another Barcamp

Honeymoon planning

More wedding plans

But at least I’ll have a few posts worth to write about next week. While My sweetie is away for a few days for work reasons.

Gadgets

George — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 19:37:54 +0000

Right so, my “about” page says I like my gadgets. Yet I haven’t said to much about them.

In truth time is a precious commodity and there are lots of things I would like to cover on this blog that I haven’t, as yet, had the time to. but thats a whole other post

Anyway, back on topic, I’m gonna include a list of my favourite gadgets and over the coming days/weeks I’ll post about each.

Hewlett Packard iPaq 6515
Media Centre PC
X-box 360
MP3 player
FujiFilm S5200 Digital Camera
This Blog
The mobile bloging gadget
Heart Monitor

There are lots more that I haven’t mentioned so bookmark this page, as I’ll be adding to the list and linking each gadget to the relevant post as I post them

Web Radio

George — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 10:07:43 +0000

A while back I discovered a web radio service called Pandora. I’ve been using it ever since, why? cause it plays toonz that I like. “Big Deal” I here you shout well have a read of this, it gives you a little insite into what makes this web radio station so different and imho better than any I have ever used before.

If your a music fan or musician with an “OpenEar ™” (That’s like an open mind for ears ) then there site is a treasure trove, that will suck up hours of your time. As an example of the kind of treats that it has helped me find, we’ve all heard this but who else has heard this version or a better example, from this song I found this one ’cause there similar??? (click the little play buttons for a sample

All I have to do now is wait for this to be made with “decent” speakers built-in so I can put them in every room of the house, ‘cept the living room of course cause the media centre PC is already plugged into the sound system there.

My RSS reader

George — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:42:25 +0000

I got introduced to RSS and what it could do about 2 years ago now. While building my own HTPC (home theatre PC) using a piece of software called meedio it had a “news” feature which I could “customise” to include any RSS news feed. Now I have long since stopped using meedio having discovered the wonders of Windows Media Centre 2005. But I still use RSS

Since then RSS has grown so much, with most news sites, blogs and podcast now offering an RSS feed. in order to make the most of this technology a good RSS reader is essential. There are all sorts available, some are standalone programs, others integrate into your e-mail client, even some browsers (firefox) include RSS. Me personally, I use an online service called Newsgator.

It’s great because you simply go to there site from any browser anywhere and you get all the news, blogs, podcast etc. that you normally would, so moving between different PC’s and locations doesn’t matter.

I’m happy to recommend Newsgator and as a result I have added the to the sidebar and page footer. If you have a Newsgator account just click the link and it’ll be added to your feeds straight away. If you use a different RSS reader then the feeds are in the page footers or you could give Newsgator a try.